After another few seconds, far below, in the earthy blackness, a new dawn of electric light flared up and streamed past the flyer’s feet, but it immediately turned into a ribbon of light and was swallowed up. Another few seconds, the same again.
“Cities! It’s cities!” cried Margarita.
After this, two or three times she saw beneath her dimly sparkling sabres nestled in their black cases, and she understood that these were rivers.
Looking up and to the left, the flyer saw that the moon above her was streaking madly back in the direction of Moscow and at the same time in a strange way was standing still, so that clearly visible on its face was some sort of enigmatic, dark marking, a dragon, or a winged horse, its sharp muzzle turned towards the abandoned city.
At that point Margarita was seized by the idea that, really, it was useless for her to fly her broom at such a frenzied speed, that she was depriving herself of the opportunity to look at anything properly, to truly drink in the flight. Something told her that wherever she was going they would wait for her, and that she had no reason to bore herself flying at such an insane speed and altitude. Margarita pointed the broom’s bristles forward, so that the handle rose and, sharply decreasing its speed, headed towards the ground. And this swoop downwards, as if on a transparent sled, gave her the very greatest pleasure. The surface grew nearer, and from what had been formless dark lees now materialized the mysteries and delights of the earth on a moonlit night. The earth rose to meet her, and Margarita was already enveloped by the scent of the greening forest. Margarita flew just above the mists rising from a dewy meadow, then over a pond. Beneath her there sang a chorus of frogs and somewhere in the distance a train whistle sounded, which for some reason troubled her heart. In a moment Margarita caught sight of it. It crawled along slowly, like a caterpillar, spitting sparks into the air. Passing it, Margarita flew over another watery mirror in which a second moon swam beneath her feet, she sank still lower went on, her feet nearly brushing the tops of immense pines.
A deep hum of rushing air became audible and began to overtake Margarita. To this noise of something speeding like a bullet there gradually accrued the sound of a woman’s laughter, audible for many miles. Margarita glanced back and saw that some sort of complicated dark shape was catching up with her. Closing in on Margarita it became more distinct, making it possible to see that it was someone riding astride. And then it became perfectly distinct: Natasha was pulling up, overtaking Margarita.
Completely naked, tousled hair flying on the wind, Natasha was riding on a fat pig which clutched a briefcase in its front trotters while its rear trotters thrashed the air agonizingly. A pince-nez which had slipped off his nose dangled along side of the pig by its cord and kept winking on and off in the moonlight. His hat kept slipping over his eyes. Looking closely, Margarita recognized the pig as Nikolai Ivanovich, whereupon her own laughter pealed out above the forest, merging with Natasha’s.
“Natashka!”shouted Margarita in a piercing voice. “Did you use the crème?
“Darling!!” Natasha’s cries roused the slumbering piney woods.” My Queen of France, I used it on his bald spot too, on him too!”
“My princess!” the pig moaned tearfully as he carried his rider at a gallop.
“Darling, Margarita Nikolaevna,” screamed Natasha, cantering abreast of Margarita, “I confess, I did use the crème. We want to live and to fly the same as you. Forgive me, my lady, but I’m not going back, not for anything. Oh it’s so good, Margarita Nikolaevna!—He made me an offer,” here Natasha’s finger poked the neck of the bewildered, panting pig, “an offer! What did you call me, eh?” she screamed, bending level with the pig’s ear.
“Goddess!” he set up a wail, “I can’t fly this fast. I could lose important papers, Natalia Prokofievna, I protest!”
“The hell with you and your papers!” cried Natasha with a mocking laugh.
“Really Natalia Prokofievna, somebody might hear us!” the pig moaned imploringly. < … >
“Margarita! Majesty! Ask them to leave me a witch! They’ll do anything for you, you have the power! And Margarita replied: “Done, I promise.”
“Thank you,” shrieked Natasha and suddenly shouted sharply and somehow plaintively: “Hey there, hey! Faster! Faster! Get moving!”
She dug her heels into the pig’s flanks, depleted by the flight, and the latter bolted so that once again the air unraveled and in an instant Natasha was already visible in the distance, then completely disappeared, and the roar of her wake dispersed.
Margarita flew on slowly as before over a deserted and unfamiliar spot, above some hills dotted with occasional boulders lying between immense lone pines. Margarita was not flying over the tops of these, but between their trunks, silvered on one side by the moon. The flyer’s delicate shadow slid over the ground in front of her, the moon was now shining on Margarita’s back.
Margarita felt the proximity of water and guessed that her destination was near. The pines parted and Margarita slowly floated towards a chalk cliff. Over the cliff down below, in shadow there lay a river. Mist hovered above and clung to the shrubs on the cliff, but the opposite shore was flat and low-lying. On it, beneath a lone group of spreading trees, a bonfire flickered and some sort of moving figures could be made out. It seemed to Margarita that a buzzing, raucous music emanated from the spot. Beyond it as far as the eye could reach on the silvered plain there was no other sign of life or humanity.
Translanslated by A. L. and M. K.
Section D
Pre-Soviet & Soviet Visions of Outer Space
THE HORIZONS OF the poet’s eye were significantly widened by spell-binding advances in technology and an outright revolution in cosmology in the 20th century. In a mere half a century man was able to accelerate his new ability to be airborn, courtesy of the Wright brothers, to space-flight itself. With the way paved by Sputnik, “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” were soon to become accessible to ordinary mortals. Once Percival Lowell observed what he considered to be “Martian canals,” the powers of astronomical observation fueled alternate paths for unchartered flights of fancy. Contact with new worlds and heretofore unknown civilizations became one of the most popular topics for an exploding literary and cinematic genre—Science Fiction—and the planet Mars was to be of particular importance in this regard, since proof of such an alien civilization seemed to have been offered by science itself. When in 1902 in France a substantial prize was offered to the person who could establish proven contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, the competition’s rules specifically excluded Mars, as the existence of Martian civilization was deemed too close to an established fact.
Before close-range pictures were sent back to Earth by Mariner and the two Viking probes, the fictional allure of Mars as a setting was overwhelming and Martian novel-writing had been extremely productive ever since H. G. Wells published his classic The War of the Worlds in 1898. Except for those envisioned by Ray Bradbury, most western fictional Martians modelled after Wells by less well-known writers were nearly always hostile and horrific. However, their counterparts as portrayed by two important Russian writers introduced in this section, Alexander Bogdanov and Alexei Tolstoy, were humanoid and quite attractive. Bogdanov’s and Tolstoy’s writings are each alloted a single entry—from the Red Planet and Aelita respectively—containing excerpts from these major works devoted to Mars. It is hoped that inclusion of these self-contained episodes and chapters will stimulate the reader to seek out full texts of these novels available in English. The regrettable fact is that neither Bogdanov nor Tolstoy, (nor Platonov, for that matter, who follows them here) rated a mention in the popular Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,1 although less accomplished authors did. Hence the justification for this section: to be both informative and enticing. In fact, each writer represented here had an admiring readership and exercised considerable influence in Russia. And each imagined space-flight to new frontiers in a unique way. In addition, each was born in I
mperial Russia and died in the Soviet Union. A companion volume of authors born after the revolution is, we hope, a future project.
The concept of space flight certainly had its antecedents in past fiction, especially in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), but modern advances in aviation technology gave it an entirely new dimension, and scientists themselves responded to earlier predictions of science fiction writers. Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky for example, evolved his concept of a multi-stage moon rocket from an inverted design of the propelling force of Verne’s cannon. In addition Tsiolkovsky, in Beyond the Planet Earth (1898-1920), predicted artificial satellites and worked on detailed descriptions of space-stations. Despite Tsiolkovsky’s penchant for Menippean satire with respect to his own ideas, his writings were hardly ground-breaking from a literary point of view. Bogdanov and Tolstoy were far more accomplished writers of fiction. Bogdanov’s novel was strongest in its elaboration of space-flight itself, whereas Tolstoy’s adventure sci-fi novel was especially successful with its readers in describing the Martian terrain and romances with blue-skinned Martian women. We offer our selections with these strengths in mind.
A number of minor science-fiction writers too numerous to list here appeared on the literary scene in post-revolutionary years. We submit newly translated selections from only two other Russian authors of the period—Andrei Platonov and Ivan Efremov. Platonov is best known for his novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), completed in 1930 but published for the first time in the west in 1973, over two decades after his death. It is a dark novel reflecting Platonov’s disillusionment with the notion of a glorious socialist future. We offer here a sampling of his earlier fiction. The loosely connected triad of separate stories Descendants of the Sun, The Lunar Probe, and The Ether Trail is still animated by enthusiasm for the coming “electric century.” In it advanced technology and space travel transform both man and his world, ushering in a utopian age. But even this triad, which forecasts a glorious future for man as he overcomes Nature with incredible technological and scientific advances, already hints at the author’s doubts regarding their desirability. It is not for nought that each of Platonov’s protagonists—”giants” propelling mankind to new leaps in technology—is an engineer whose emotional life is either tragic, or absent altogether. Their romantic and domestic failures implicitly qualify the “glorious” life created by technological progress and socialism as not necessarily conducive to individual happiness or emotional fulfillment. Upon learning that one of these engineers is married, a colleague exclaims: “Married, hell! You’ve gotten used to sentimentality. As for me, brother, work is a more lasting legacy than children!” It is clear that Platonov, in the initial stages of his writing career undeniably enamored of science and technology, already entertained real doubts as to their benefits and their human cost. This hesitancy engendered stories like Makar the Doubtful (1929), for which Platonov was persecuted by the regime. Such persecution, renewed after WWII, made it impossible for his larger works, in which the author’s attitude toward “socialist enthusiasm” became clearly satirical, from appearing in the USSR. Eventually Platonov’s name, like Zamiatin’s, was erased from the official history of Soviet literature.
Of the writers cited so far, only Efremov survived significantly beyond the year 1957, which heralded the Sputnik era. His influential, large-scale utopian novel, Andromeda Nebula (Tumannost’ Andromedy), set in the far future of interstellar travel, was in fact published in book form the same year that Sputnik flew into space. Perhaps chiefly on this account he was the first post-war Soviet writer to reach legendary fame among younger Russians, ensuring that the space-travel theme would become the prevalent subject of post-war Soviet science fiction. So far his novel has existed only in a pedestrian English translation, and in offering two of its chapters we hope to remedy his near obscurity among English readers. Like Bogdanov’s novel, Andromeda justifies the tenets of communist doctrine though space exploration. In Bogdanov’s case that doctrine is unambiguously glued onto Mars, shown to have dialectically evolved into a rational society based on love of labor and gender equality, which provided an inspiring example to the visiting Earthling. In Efremov’s novel, mankind itself is shown to have achieved space travel precisely because it has embraced the rational, scientific principles of communist doctrine—which, as it turns out, have universal appeal. As an intergalactic transmission from the humanoid civilization on 61 Cygni has it: “Separated by space and time we are united by intellect.” But if one forgets about the doctrinaire messages of both, there is much to admire in these works. There is Bogdanov’s skilled use of androgyny to confirm his belief in the equality of the sexes, and his anticipation of automated production and atomic fission, and there is Efremov’s ability to project the vastness of space itself. When read to the accompaniment of Sputnik’s orbital beeps, Andromeda—with its skilled use of authentic and imagined scientific concepts—was Russia’s first readable work celebrating the fantastic possibilities inherent in mankind’s leap into space.
However tantalizing such possibilities were, a society governed solely by intellect was doomed to failure, just as Dostoevsky had predicted. About three decades after Efremov’s novel, Russian society celebrated the millennium of its existence as an organized state and of its acceptance of Christianity. By that time there were signs that communist doctrine had already exhausted itself, and since then vast numbers of Russians have once again embraced the metaphysical, finding it principally in the belief system of the Orthodox church. But the seeds were there earlier. In 1963—six years after Andromeda—Efremov produced The Blade’s Edge, a novel whose interest in eastern religion and yogic meditation ensured its rejection by the regime censors. The book became an underground best-seller and copies of it sold for approximately a month’s salary for the average Russian, the same price as a copy of the quintessential banned classic, The Bible.
Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov
[Malinovsky]
(1873–1928)
_____________________________________
Red Star
[The Flight to Mars. Abridged]
CHAPTER V: DEPARTURE
… My attention was involuntarily devoted to the exciting and imminent moment of our take-off. I watched the snowy surface of the lake which lay before us and a beetling granite cliff behind us, expecting a sudden shock and their sudden disappearance as we ascended. But nothing like this happened at all.
Silently, slowly, with a barely perceptible motion, the snow-covered landscape began to leave us. For several seconds I was not aware that we had risen at all.
“The rate of increase is two centimeters,” said Menni.
I understood what this meant. In the first second we were to move one centimeter, in the second—three centimeters, in the third—five centimeters, in the fourth—seven centimeters; thus our speed was to be constantly changing, at an arithmetically progressive rate. Within a minute we would reach the speed of a walking man, in fifteen minutes that of an express train, and so on. < … > The ground was rapidly leaving us and the horizon expanding. The dark masses of the cliffs and the villages were diminishing and the outlines of the lakes could be seen as on a map. The sky was becoming constantly darker; at the same time that the dark blue band of the unfrozen sea claimed the entire western horizon my eyes began to distinguish the brighter stars even with a noon-day sun in the sky.
The very slow spinning of the spaceship around its vertical axis made it possible for us to see space in all directions.
It seemed that the horizon was rising with us and Earth’s surface below us appeared as a huge slightly convex dish with decorations provided by the Earth’s relief. But their outlines became more blurred, the contours flatter, and the whole landscape appeared more and more like a geographic map, sharply delimited in its center, but vague indefinite at the periphery where it was draped in a semi-transparent, bluish fog. And the sky had become absolutely black and innumerable stars, even the most minute, shown down on
us with their steady unwinking light, unafraid of the sun whose rays had become painfully hot.
“Tell me, Menni, will that two-centimeter rate of increase at which we are now moving continue for our entire journey?”
“Yes,” he answered, “but half way through our trip it will be reversed and every second our speed will decrease by the same measurement. Thus, although the greatest speed of the spaceship will be about 2,000 miles an hour and the average speed about 1,000 miles an hour, at the moment of arrival it will be as slight as at the beginning of our journey, and without any shock or strain we will drop onto the surface of Mars. Without this great and variable speed we would not be able to reach either Earth or Venus because at their closest point—40 million or 65 million miles respectively—at the speed of, say, one of your trains, the journey would require centuries, not months as does ours. As to the possibility of a “cannon shot” such as I have read about in one of your science fiction novels, that would be only a joke, because in accordance with the laws of mechanics, to be inside a shell when it is fired would be the same as having the shell fired at you.”
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